Travel Industry

The travel industry is a complex domain in which modern and archaic technology overlap on a regular basis. You have cutting edge data management and aggregation like Google Flights providing better insight and clarity for the consumer than ever before, alongside technologies from before the modern computing era still influencing the day to day lives of travel agents such as the GDS system from Sabre.

These travel agents, who are effectively the "power users" of this industry, still work in text consoles with special key sequences and commands necessary to accomplish their day to day jobs. They are forced into a situation of being primarily a customer service role but requiring the complexity of being a vim user to accomplish your primary work. Air Desk agents (agents specializing in the complexity of air bookings and ticketing issues) in particular can spend their entire day in these GDS systems dealing with complex organizational systems for flight codes, ticket management, seat assignment, and numerous other nitpicks that are the nature of their specialty.

This exists in sharp contrast to the consumer side of the travel business, well illustrated by the likes of Expedia, showing a focused emphasis on simplicity above all else. The modern e-commerce industry knows that the more complexity you add to a shopping experience, the more likely you are to lose visitors to a competing site/service. This results in OTAs with the financial power to leverage their market position going to extraordinary lengths to capture the legacy representations of these travel offerings and force them into near modern molds to appeal to the online shopper.

Shopper Incentives

Another major issue comparing Consumer and Agent Travel Business is the difference in incentives.

Ultimately, agents still have the primary goal of customer satisfaction to retain business, but there are still numerous other factors influencing their decisions beyond that primary goal.

Consumers are focused on fairly simple goals

1. Feeling informed,
2. Feeling like they made a good decision, whatever that decision is, and
3. Feeling good about the price they are paying

Agents instead have numerous incentives secondary to pure customer satisfaction, or that simply do not perfectly parallel the goals on the Consumer side.

1. Working with vendors who are familiar and reliable,
2. Earning a high commission, and
3. Easing the booking process and ongoing maintenance

Past Vendor Experience

Agents can be influenced by their time in the industry and past experience with vendors/suppliers. Typically, this is a benefit to a customer they are helping, as it lets them assist the customer in finding exactly what they want and in making a more informed decision.

From an engineering perspective, this can make your job considerably more difficult. Each agent using your system may have different preferences for vendors and may have different reasons for those preferences. This will affect their expectations in terms of shopping and display in particular, and any deviation between your system and their preferred vendor's system will be seen as an immediate blocker for adopting your software, regardless of the other benefits.

This also means that any effort placed in aggregating and normalizing data can feel like a waste of time, as they have no expectation of doing inventory comparison between vendors in the first place; they already know who they plan to work with and who is best for their customer. All of this effort to give an honest comparison of apples to apples so that pricing can be considered on a level playing field is wasted on a travel agent with decades of experience and a strong (and completely reasonable) desire to first and foremost ensure their customer has a pleasant and memorable experience.

Commissions

The most purely conflicting concern of a professional travel agent is the matter of commission.

Commissions are a portion of the total cost of a purchased travel product that is paid to the agent who facilitated the sale. Their "cut" for their work, as it were. Different vendors and different offerings can have drastically different commission structures, changing the financial incentive for a travel agent drastically.

In a modern ecommerce world, the existence of the commission portion of the pricing at all is a detriment to the competitive value of the offering. Sites like Expedia, which dominate the Online Travel Agency business, negotiate the rates they sell to reduce the factor of the commission and give them the most competitive rates possible. That isn't to say they aren't making a profit off of their sales, but they rely more on small margins at high volume than the travel agent model which often results in a travel agent spending an hour or more on selling a single travel product to a customer, meaning they only receive a single commission amount for that hour of effort.

Booking Experience and Maintenance

The involvement of an agent in the sale of a travel product also increases the complexity of the booking and post-booking behavior from the vendor.

Travel agents need to be treated much like the traveler/purchaser themselves when it comes to matters of data access and privacy. This can cause issues with federal, state, and local laws related to PII and other privacy law concerns. This also increases the complexity of the vendor's handling of data, as they have to keep track of another entity that is not the one paying them (potentially) and will not be participating in the actual travel.

This additional party needs to be able to call in and make changes, make inquiries, and needs to receive an additional copy of all travel documents to be able to accurately advise the customer they are serving. For travel products that are booked far in the future such as cruises and tours, this can add overhead for months if not years before the actual start of travel.

The quality of the vendor's support for these actions can influence the agent's decision making at shopping time. Even if not consciously, if particular vendors make ongoing support more difficult than others, it can cause an agent to prioritize them less when comparing various options for their customer.